SEEN NOT HEARD
The intersection of sight and sound is a vital moment. It is where thought occurs, where our objects gain identity in our own reality constructs, and for those lucky enough to experience true synesthesia, it is a tangible presence. For the rest of us, we'll just have to imagine.
Starting from the historical tradition of visualizing sounds, I painted the colors and rhythms of a particular song: Flying Lotus' Massage Situation. The structure of a song and that of a painting are entirely different; a fact I came to realize by the end of the finished painting. It's not art. It's an example of a system I've developed over time to represent sounds. Though more effective as as animation (a medium that share's music's linear progression over time), the system still shows textures and rhythms effectively.
Unsatisfied with simple representation, I grew curious if I could combine this synethesial depiction of music with my other bodies of work. After exploring the contemporary world of alienated individuals in hopelessly sterile machine-worlds (see Towers of Babylon), I wanted to examine music's role in that same environment. Does music still carry the emotional resonance and humanistic qualities that have for so long rendered it among humanity's greatest accomplishments? After meticulously arranging our surroundings with ever more powerful tools, what does it mean to arrange notes on paper?
Music lives. It has been corrupted into a tool of advertising, and pushed into the backgrounds of our day-to-day worlds under the name of “Muzak”. Sounds become part of applied aesthetics, one of many tools used in malls and movies to give order to the masses. Every instance of musical innovation has been repeated and absorbed into the Culture Industry. The technology that has become so vital to our comfortable lives is irreversibly involved in the generation and distribution of music, seemingly taking the power of creation away from human hands.
Yet music today is open to more possibilities and to a wider audience than ever before. In many instances it has been a driving force of counter cultures; it is still art. It sometimes seems to be the last human connection in an increasingly less intimate world.
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Please contact me at beandrew@gmail.com
All work and images © Benjamin Andrew 2009